Lake Placid

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

As irritating as Lake Placid sometimes is, it also has an easygoing sense of fun, along with one of the more memorable movie monsters of recent years. The mismatched ingredients blend into a blissfully, stupidly surreal summer cocktail.

Empire Andrew Collins

A straightforward camping-holiday nightmare, or a sly, ironic take on the same. It works deliciously as both.

Film Threat Ron Wells

While we do get a bit of gore, the movie is really about this wacky bunch of people jumping on each other's nerves, kind of a zany hero's journey.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

A formulaic thriller, treated in a style that's just shy of outright parody.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Comes in well under the ninety-minute mark, leaving no room for bombast or overkill.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The strange thing is that for all of Fonda's whining, Pullman's wary squinting and muttering, the bad dialogue, the cheesy effects, the severed toes, the severed heads, the severed bodies and the cliched directorial choices, Lake Placid adds up to a halfway enjoyable time at the movies.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

It also goes out of its way to give you a schlocky B-movie vibe by wrangling bait in the form of a bunch of Big-Gulp stupid stock characters - that's a whopping 44 oz. more stupid than you probably were bargaining for.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It’s a comedy, a romantic star vehicle, a thriller, a horror movie and a quasi-environmental parable that's calculated to appeal to all demographic groups. It's not enough of any one of these things to be particularly engaging.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Smoothly enjoyable, undemanding entertainment and features a couple of knock-out giant croc attacks.

USA Today Andy Seiler

Amusingly macabre. [16 July 1999]

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

Trouble is, while not trading quips, the characters actually go through the motions of being scared of the croc, menaced by the croc and so on. And since even the gator horror satire is old hat (remember ''Alligator?''), there's no remaining way to make this interesting.

Dallas Observer Andy Klein

The only genuine surprises on hand are the few moments when the film defies the expectations that have been programmed into our collective neurons by the past 25 years of horror movies.

Variety Robert Koehler

To be sure, Kelley's Emmy-winning brand of off-kilter humor and cockeyed affection for rural folk is on display, but his attempt here to blend the citified angst of "Ally McBeal" (co-star Bridget Fonda was Kelley's first choice as that series' lead) with the countrified absurdisms of "Picket Fences," plus bits out of the Peter Benchley playbook, doesn't hold water.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's like a summer stock "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," with the proviso that occasionally a giant snaggle-tooth monster slobbers onstage and eats George or Martha.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

It's laughably stupid, only fitfully scary and relatively harmless summer fun – if you're 12 years old, in which case you probably aren't supposed to be going to movies like this anyway.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

A bunch of IQ-challenged characters traipsing through a laughably bad scenario brought to life using silly dialogue, banal direction, and questionable special effects.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie is pretty bad, all right. But it has a certain charm. It's so completely wrong-headed from beginning to end that it develops a doomed fascination.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

An almost mystifyingly bad movie.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Instead of rooting for Pullman and Fonda, we end up praying that the crocodile is hungry enough to put them out of their misery.

Newsweek Jane Hogan

A "croc" of nonsense.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Stephen Thompson

It doesn't help that, at 80 or so minutes, it feels like there's a reel missing—you know, the one with the finale that's even slightly more pulse-pounding than any of the four or five other scenes in which the big, impressive-looking monster attacks the heroes as their legs dangle in the water.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

A smallish cast peppered with a pair of bullish performances by both Platt and the lesser-known Gleeson. The two spark some chemistry between them, which is more than can be said for Pullman and Fonda's moribund performances.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

The shticky dialogue undercuts the solid genre plotting, which undercuts the humor.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

By the end of this mercifully short excuse for a horror movie, you'll be wishing the beast had chowed down on the entire ensemble.